The '100 Eskimo words for snow' claim is mostly a linguistic myth

The idea that Eskimo–Aleut languages have vastly more words for snow than English spread through decades of casual retelling, each version inflating the count further with little evidence behind it. A linguist traced the claim back to a thin, second-hand 1911 remark and showed it had snowballed into a media cliché wildly disproportionate to the modest, ordinary word-building actually involved.

— Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language — University of Chicago Press, 1991
Go deeper: get the book →